Cockatoos Learn Carpentry from One Another: Creating Tools to Harvest Nuts

Parrots are some of the smartest birds in the world and now, scientists have found out that they're a bit more intelligent than they expected. They've found that Goffin's cockatoos can learn how to make and use wooden tools from one another.

Goffin's cockatoos are Indonesian parrots that aren't normally known to use tools in the wild. Yet at a laboratory in Austria, scientists spotted a cockatoo named "Figaro" spontaneous start to sculpt stick tools out of wooden aviary beams in order to use them for raking in nuts out of his reach. In  order to see whether this behavior was learned and could be passed on, the researchers exposed other cockatoos to tool demonstrations, some with Figaro as a teacher and others without.

In one session, one cockatoo group saw Figaro employ a ready-made stick tool. Another group saw "ghost demonstrations" where the tools displaced nuts by themselves while being controlled with magnets hidden under the table, or saw the nuts move toward Figaro without his intervention. Then, the birds were placed in front of an identical problem with a ready-made tool lying nearby.

In the end, the birds that saw Figaro's complete demonstration interacted much more with potential tools and other components of the problem.

"This is the first controlled evidence for the social transmission of an original tool use event in any bird so far," said Stefan Weber, one of the researchers, in a news release.

That's not all the researchers found, though. The successful birds also didn't exactly mimic Figaro's technique. Instead, they developed their own, more-efficient method, essentially surpassing the master.

"This means that although watching Figaro's movements was necessary for their success they did not imitate his exact motor activities," said Alice Auersperg, who led the study. "Successful observers seemed to attend to the result of Figaro's interaction with the tool but developed their own strategies for reaching the same result, rather than copying his actions. This is typical of what psychologists would call emulation learning."

The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.